


Dead Serious

by rispacooper



Series: That Bones/Criminal Minds Cracky Crossover Love Story [5]
Category: Bones (TV), Criminal Minds
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Crack Pairing, Crime Scenes, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-01
Updated: 2012-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 23:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rispacooper/pseuds/rispacooper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wendell figures out what he wants, he just isn't sure what to do about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Serious

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I can't leave things with even a sort of unhappy ending. I can't do it, even knowing that there is fluff and smut to come. I would have written that too, but I ran out of time. I swear, this is the weirdest thing. The pairing yes, but also how...random it is to write. There is no plan, just scenes. I don't usually do that. Which might be why every scene is coming out differently. I will shut up now. tl;dr etc. 
> 
> But I need to quit making them have moments in hot fields around dead bodies.

Wendell had been in Limbo when he’d first heard that a farmer in Virginia had uncovered bodies on his property. Actually, he’d seen it on the news, not heard it, because Hodgins had come in to where he was working and pulled up the news on his tablet. Bodies, plural, was alarming, but Wendell hadn’t seen why Hodgins had come all the way down to Wendell to tell him about the case, not until he’d looked closer at the new footage on the screen and noticed that the people milling around the crime scene were wearing FBI jackets. 

He hadn’t seen Booth in the original news coverage, but Booth had probably been there or on his way there at the time. He hadn’t seen Dr. Brennan either, but he’d known from the sight of those FBI jackets that the Bureau would call in Dr. Brennan to assist with identifying the remains and that with as many bodies as they were saying there were, Dr. Brennan was going to call him. 

He should have been elated at the chance to get more work in, more experience, and he had been. But Hodgins had been giving him that hopeful look he had whenever he thought Wendell needed encouraging about something personal. It was one of the reasons Wendell was still friends with Hodgins after everything. It was also annoying, because Hodgins had been doing it with an added arched eyebrow that meant he thought he knew something. 

“The FBI need your help, it’s totally your chance, man.” That was what Hodgins had said, and Wendell would have told him to shut up, because he didn’t want to talk about the FBI anymore, or at all, ever, except for Booth, but then his cell phone had gone off with the call from Dr. Brennan and Angela had walked in, with that same, smirking, knowing expression on her face. 

Now Wendell was in the middle of a sticky, hot field, covered in dust and trying very hard not to look over at the flashing lights at the edge of the farmer’s property. He knew what those arriving cars meant. To be honest, he’d expected them the first day, but perhaps Booth hadn’t called them until today, to give Wendell some time to prepare. 

It was the kind of thing Booth would do, not that Booth was going to talk to Wendell about it. Wendell respected that, honestly, he even preferred it, because this last month had been Angela and Hodgins pushing him to go out and setting him up with people when he didn’t need setting up and prodding him to confide in them, and Wendell really wasn’t a confider. 

They knew his date hadn’t gone well, and they probably knew from his silence about it that it mattered to him, which was why they kept pressing. But Wendell didn’t want to talk about it. 

Thank God for Dr. Brennan, who had kept him busy with the unidentified bodies in the vault and who hadn’t seemed to know, or even care, what was bothering him the way everyone else had. And when he had said something, he still didn’t know why, late at night when they’d been alone in the lab, wondering why bones were so much easier to understand than people, she had only peered at him for a moment, trying to see into him, or maybe just irritated with the interruption, before responding distractedly that according to Booth most people were motivated by a fear of pain. 

Then she’d ordered him down into Limbo with all the stored, unidentified skeletons and bone fragments to look at the remains of a soldier from World War I and she’d kept him there for a few weeks. Wendell hadn’t complained. Any experience was good and he’d liked the way Brennan had said “Good work” when he’d identified the remains as belonging to Alexander Harris from Yonkers and sent the notification off to the man’s descendants, almost a hundred years too late. 

It had been the one bright spot in his month and he didn’t think it was going to get any brighter now, no matter what Hodgins thought he was supposed to do now that the BAU had arrived. Wendell couldn’t try again because Aaron didn’t want him to, and that was that…except for the nagging feeling that he was missing something. 

He focused on his work, on the pieces of skull he had arranged on the table before him. They weren’t cleaned, he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, assemble them unless time became an issue, but he’d checked each tiny fragment of bone for traces to send to Hodges and even without putting it together he knew it was a skull of a young girl, probably of mixed racial descent, who had the fillings of someone with a sweet tooth and with parents who had cared for her and taken her to the dentist. 

She’d been missed. He didn’t think comparing her remains to a missing persons profile to find a match would take very long. And when he did that it would give Aaron and his team what they needed to create a profile, and then Booth would use that to catch the asshole that had did this and make him pay. 

Emotion made him hotter, focus harder, but he knew Dr. Brennan wouldn’t mind. This was the one area of feeling that she understood. She was down at another grave now, sweeping soil away from yet another body, and Wendell had to have a preliminary ID and cause of death on this girl before she brought him the next set of bones. 

He handled her carefully, first noticing what was not there, the skin, the flesh long since decayed to nothing, and then the clothes, the hair. There weren’t any marks on her, not to see with the naked eye, except for how her skull was shattered. They’d found one gold stud earring with her, though she’d probably had two. The impact of the killing blow might have knocked the other earring loose somewhere else, or the killer might have kept it, but it wasn’t Wendell’s job to think about that, something he was grateful for. 

It was the kind of thing that Aaron was supposed to think about. It was his job, imagining those last moments based on what Wendell and Hodgins and Dr. Brennan would tell him. It was the reason, one of them, that Aaron was the way he was. 

Wendell exhaled softly as he laid the little girl’s bones out, laid her out, and then got the camera to take pictures to upload to Angela so she could imagine the face in case the dental records couldn’t find anything. 

There were people talking around him, outside the tent set up to preserve both the crime scene and the privacy of the dead, people talking in hushed tones as though the spot were sacred. Booth, Wendell identified one voice. Aaron and Rossi and the others too. There, looking over what had been found so far though that information had probably already been run by them. 

The farmer had abandoned this section of his property a few years ago, saying he’d hadn’t had enough money to farm it and had no one interested in buying it. It wasn’t fenced and it wasn’t too far from the interstate. Their suspect pool was going to be wide, but Wendell had no doubt they would find them. 

The BAU, Dr. Brennan, Booth, they were the best, and until he became the best too, Wendell was glad to help them. 

“There you go,” he told the girl, softly, because Dr. Brennan spoke _for_ the dead but not _to_ the dead, and turned to upload the pictures. Angela’s face instantly popped up on his laptop, as if she’d been waiting to chat about this, as if just having Wendell trapped meant that this was the time or place. 

“Are they there yet?” She didn’t say who and he didn’t pretend he didn’t guess. He shook his head without turning around. “Is _he_ there? I still haven’t seen anything except his ID photo when I looked it up…and maybe some news footage. I have to say, he looks good in front of a camera for a jerk who broke your heart.”

“He didn’t…” Wendell bit the words back just in time. Angela was fishing. It probably irked her that she didn’t know the details. 

“I didn’t think he’d show up. Isn’t he some kind of big shot in the ‘hunting for scary sickos’ world?” 

The question made him jump a little and Wendell frowned. He supposed Aaron was a big shot. He hadn’t thought about it. Aaron outranked Booth, Wendell knew that, but neither of them had acted like that mattered so Wendell had never questioned it. 

“Of course he’d show up,” he said instead of discussing that. Aaron didn’t use his rank to get things. Not even to intimidate asshole bartenders. Not unless he had a good reason to, like finding a killer or saving someone. “There’s someone killing girls and leaving them in a field. He’d show up even if he was so tired he was dead on his feet. It’s what he does. He chases monsters down into places most people are afraid to go.”

He’d said too much. He could tell right away from the way Angela’s smile changed. It disappeared and he was surprised by the way she blinked before looking down. 

“Wendell Wendell Wendell…” She shook her head and it took Wendell a second to realize she was teasing him. Wendell considered pretending he’d lost the connection, but he knew she wouldn’t buy it. “You really don’t get it do you?” Angela let out a despairing sigh. “I meant I’m surprised he’d show his face around you, considering the number he pulled on you.” 

“Number?” Wendell huffed an irritated breath. “There wasn’t any number pulling.” There hadn’t been any pulling, Wendell still couldn’t believe it. It was the one and only time in his life that someone had left _before_ sleeping with him. It was no wonder he’d been such a mess that he couldn’t even go get laid anymore without screwing that up too. But he wasn’t thinking about that around Angela, that was dangerous. She could sense weakness. “As for the rest…that’s just…Aaron. He’s not going to be scared away from anything. Definitely not by me.” 

In response, Angela lifted one eyebrow. She’d either picked that up from Hodgins or he’d gotten it from her. Wendell was happy for them, he really was, but they were getting on his nerves with this. 

“I’m fine,” he insisted, out of nowhere, which didn’t strengthen his argument. 

“Sweetie, I will kick his ass for you,” she promised and Wendell thought about pointing out that _Angela_ kicking the ass of _someone else_ for hurting him was a little ironic. He didn’t. He just flicked a finger out to hit a button and end the chat without telling her goodbye. It was oddly satisfying. 

When he turned around again, forgetting where he was for an instant, he was almost startled to see the members of the BAU walking out in pairs over the crime scene. Morgan and Reid were heading down toward Dr. Brennan and for a second, Wendell was tempted to go watch Reid introduce himself to her. She was still irritated with Dr. Reid for assembling that skeleton on a case a few years back, the BAU had been pressed for time, but Dr. Brennan was very serious about the handling of remains, especially by amateurs, even amateurs with multiple PhDs. 

Rossi was talking on his cell phone a few yards away, though he was looking at Wendell. Their eyes met for a moment before Wendell’s computer dinged at him, thankfully calling him away. It was an IM from Penelope. 

_“I haven’t forgiven you for falling off the face of the earth for a month,”_ it read. _“However, there are bad guys to catch so send me your data as you collect it. Nice coveralls.”_

Wendell glanced down at his coveralls, and then looked around, once, before deciding he didn’t care how Penelope had seen him. Satellite imagery, someone’s cell phone, hacking into his webcam, whatever, he didn’t want to know. At least she hadn’t surprised with him an onscreen chat like Angela. 

_“I was busy,”_ he typed back. A message from Angela came back, four possible matches for his victim from the D.C., more if they broadened the search. He sent that on to Penelope too, then signed the trace samples he’d collected over to the agent who would take them to Hodgins and his machines at the Jeffersonian. 

His computer dinged again. Penelope was faster than Angela, or she’d gotten more information on likely victims. She had it narrowed to two. They just had to wait on DNA or the dental records, whichever came first. 

_“Okay I forgive you,”_ Penelope added, and despite the time and the place and everything else it made Wendell smile. _“Because it’s been a hellacious month and because “busy” is guy speak for moping. But you owe me coffee.”_

 _“I didn’t know you were a profiler too,”_ Wendell typed back after a few moments’ thought and then turned away from the computer. He hadn’t thought he’d missed her until now. It was strange, he barely knew the members of Aaron’s team. They’d only worked together a few times. He’d always had that problem with coworkers, getting more attached than he meant to. But he wasn’t like Brennan; he liked feeling things. 

Not every feeling was great but no one had said they would be so he couldn’t complain, no one ever promised anything and that was the way it should be. There were worse things than feeling like shit for a month, or wondering if he was slow here because everyone else was acting like he was. Life, as he was reminded every day and especially today, could be very short. Your happiness and your intentions didn’t matter. 

He thought that again several hours later while resting on a fallen log at the far end of the farmer’s property, in the shade of an oak tree. The cars and trucks weren’t that far away from him, but the tents and the flags and grids across the dirt were, and for the moment he was fine with that. 

If he turned his head he could see the news trucks, though the FBI and the local police had kept them too far back to really see anything. That made him smile a bit too. He didn’t envy Booth or Aaron for the notifications he knew they would both be making, but at least it would be them telling the families and not the families finding out through an image on TV. It was going to be another long day for all of them, but he hadn’t seen anyone give any sign that they wanted to go home, not even Angela who never liked violent crimes, though at least she’d left him alone for now. 

Wendell sat back as much as he could and then turned his head at the hint of dark motion to one side. Aaron, in a black suit on a hot day, and coming Wendell’s way with a very deliberate walk. Wendell recognized that walk; he’d seen it before. Aaron didn’t have to approach him if he didn’t want to, Wendell wasn’t expecting him to make polite conversation, though seeing him wasn’t exactly a surprise. 

It wasn’t a surprise that he looked good either. Thin, but Aaron worked hard and Penelope had said it had been a hellacious month. Wendell couldn’t see Aaron’s eyes because of his sunglasses, but the bottle of water in his hand got his attention. 

Aaron stopped in front of him and held the bottle out. It was exactly the kind of thing he would do for a friend or a member of his team. Look like he hadn’t been paying attention to them and then show that he’d actually been watching closely. Wendell’s pulse picked up. He was an idiot, he accepted that. At least his flushed skin could be blamed on the weather. 

He knew it was more than a crush, by this point it was pretty obvious. But even then he should have been over it by now. He frowned and took the bottle, popping the cap and drinking about half the contents. Aaron might have watched, but the sunglasses let him hide his face. It was cheating, Wendell decided, it wasn’t like Aaron to cheat. He didn’t need the advantage. He frowned for that and closed the bottle to put it at his feet. 

He jerked his head at the log, not expecting Aaron to sit down and blinking a little when he did. Aaron slid his sunglasses off too and put them in his pocket. Every time he did something like that, reading Wendell’s mind and then reacting by doing the decent and honest thing, Wendell felt a little rush of dizziness. He finally looked away. 

“They brought in dogs. They haven’t indicated any new grave locations.” Business first, Aaron reported the details. Wendell let his shoulders drop. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding in tension all day until Aaron said there wouldn’t be any more bodies. The recently dead, the ones with more tissue, they were so much harder to think about. 

“That’s good. That’s…” He couldn’t articulate how good that was. “Really good.” When he glanced over, Aaron looked up into his face, reading his expression before he nodded. 

“It’s the curse of what we do. More bodies means more evidence. But it also means…”

“More victims,” Wendell finished quietly then scrubbed absently at the back of his head. Where all the killing blows had fallen on all the victims, but he wasn’t thinking about that now, about who had lured them in, made them trust, and then crushed the back of their skulls. In the terms of Wendell’s discipline, whatever wounds had been inflicted before death had been superficial, no matter how painful, because there’d been no trace on the rest of the bones. He’d bet that in the terms of Aaron’s discipline, no wound was considered superficial. 

He didn’t want to think about that either, though Aaron would have read his field reports by now as well as Dr. Brennan’s. He was more patient than Dr. Sweets was about her attitude toward psychology and profiling; Wendell assumed it was how understanding the BAU was toward victims, not that Dr. Brennan would ever admit to that. 

“How did it go when Dr. Brennan met Dr. Reid?” Dr. Brennan wouldn’t lose her temper, but she didn’t need to to be effective. The remark made Aaron lift his eyebrows and smile. 

“She made her views clear. I don’t think many people have ever made Reid feel stupid.” 

Wendell smiled too, though his smile was proud. “She’s good at it.”

“And you?” Aaron changed the topic, just like that. “Does she make you feel stupid? I didn’t think so,” he added when Wendell shook his head. “I’m glad. I’m glad she appreciates you.” Something warmed Aaron’s voice, then he cleared his throat and glanced away. Wendell handed him the bottle of water without even a grin. Aaron took it with a level, suspicious look but didn’t comment. 

“How’s Jack?” Wendell could have asked Penelope, now that he knew about Aaron’s son but he deliberately hadn’t even let himself talk to her. Her loyalty was to Hotch. The same way Angela’s was to Wendell. She wanted what was best for him. So did Hodgins. Even Booth. 

Evidently a question about Jack was the one thing Aaron hadn’t expected to hear from Wendell. He glanced over sharply and kept his gaze steady on Wendell. Wendell stared back for a moment, for as long as he could, then swallowed and looked down at the ground. 

“He’s good,” Aaron spoke to the top of his head. He was too far away for Wendell to feel it, but then, Aaron kept his voice lowered. He didn’t share his son with just anyone. “He’s really good. He had some difficulty with a boy at school and his soccer team has played a few pre-season games. They’d probably win more if they had better coaches.”

“That’s good,” Wendell agreed warmly, knowing he sounded stupid and vague but meaning it. He lifted his head and tried to do better. “Except for the kid at school part. And the part about his coaches. They suck, huh?” 

The wide, shamed smile on Aaron’s face told its own story. “We could do better.” 

Wendell let his mouth fall open but quickly closed it. It wasn’t fair that he didn’t know he wanted things until they were in front of him but just out of reach. It was like life showing him what he could have had when it was too late. 

“You coach your son’s soccer team?” He didn’t know why he asked, he already knew Aaron would do anything for his son, even coach a game he probably knew nothing about. But the image, Aaron up early in the morning, wearing shorts and whistle, surrounded by little kids and trying to get them to understand game theory…it was just too much. 

He laughed and couldn’t stifle it in time. Aaron gave him a look that only made him warmer. “Oh God you were serious, you _do_.” He didn’t laugh this time, but his smile broke through. “Do you even like soccer?” 

The way Aaron shook his head, sort of lost, was very clearly a _no_. Aaron probably handed out orange slices and gave kids rides home and showed up late to his own games because of his schedule. Maybe his assistant coach was better. “So who is ‘we’?” 

Aaron looked out over the field, in the direction of the tents and a figure that looked like Agent Rossi. 

For a confused moment Wendell imagined the two of them as more than two coaches, and then he tossed his head to get rid of that picture. He’d seen Rossi with women, he didn’t think so. In any event, Rossi, like the rest of Aaron’s team, knew about them. Wendell knew that without the man ever saying a word. It was another secret that team kept locked between them, though Wendell couldn’t make himself mind. If they’d said something about it directly, he would have had to answer them, and he still wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t even know what to say to Aaron. 

He was a doctoral candidate with a demanding internship and very little free time. He had massive debt that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon and a dissertation to finish, in addition to the job search that was going to have to happen once he did. 

Aaron was a single parent with an even more impossible schedule and zero experience at all with men. He’d been absolutely right to say this was a bad idea. 

Of course, he’d also said that Wendell could achieve anything he set his mind to, and he’d somehow managed to fit a kid’s soccer league into his hectic schedule. That might not mean a lot in the long term, or it might mean everything. Wendell still wasn’t sure, but he licked his lips. 

“You know, I like soccer,” he offered up, keeping his eyes on Rossi while Aaron considered him. It sounded small and pathetic, not quite good enough and he knew it, but he left it there without qualifying it because what else could he do?

After a minute or so he shrugged. “How’ve you been? Penelope said you had quite a month.” 

“We were busy,” Aaron answered, and was probably confused when that made Wendell grin. He had no way of knowing what Penelope had said earlier, but Wendell decided it was funny. Not that he thought Aaron was moping. They’d had one date, there was nothing to mope about, but he liked the idea that he might have affected Aaron at least a little as much as Aaron had fucked with him. 

“You?” Aaron waited until the smile dropped from Wendell’s face to ask. Wendell glanced at him and debated trying a non-committal shrug. With anyone else, he would have. 

“Busy.” It was a safe answer. Wendell stared out at the tents. “I went on a few dates.” 

It was only because he was so still, because he was holding his breath, that he heard the air rush out of Aaron. He knew that sound. It didn’t make him smile, he couldn’t, and he wouldn’t have even if his chest hadn’t been locked and his stomach hadn’t been knotted tight. 

“That’s good.” Aaron took way too long to say it. Really, someone ought to tell them both to learn some new words if they were going to have these awkward conversations, but Wendell wasn’t about to. He straightened his shoulders and looked over. 

“Is it?” He’d hated each date. Perfectly nice people who must have been told he wanted a post-breakup hook up because that’s what they’d been after, and that’s what they had been, nice hook ups. Not intense, not serious, not Aaron. 

Aaron _looked_ at him, looked at his body and his mouth and his face and then just into his eyes. 

“No.” Stark and stripped and white in the sun. Wendell stopped, everything stopped except the tragedy across the field. He had to fight not to move. He looked at Aaron, that mouth he’d kissed, his neck, his shoulders, his chest. Then he looked up. 

“You still want me?” Wendell wasn’t Aaron; he had to ask these things. Aaron ducked his head and turned his mouth up. 

“Yes.” Flat, calm, and absolutely sincere. 

He was trying to fuck with Wendell, that’s what it was. Wendell wondered, just for a moment, if he looked at Aaron and tried to see past his skin to skeleton of him underneath, what did Aaron try to see when he looked at him? Or did Aaron already see everything and that’s why he kept rejecting him? 

“I don’t see it ending well.” That was what Aaron said, after moments, minutes, of staring into Wendell’s head, and put a hand down on the bench, close to Wendell’s hand without touching it. Wendell scowled and wondered why Aaron would do it at all if it wasn’t to touch him? Aaron was too smart for accidents and too strong to give in to small temptations, wasn’t he?

Either way Wendell deliberately put his hand over Aaron’s and held it there. “Hotch is never wrong?”

“No I am wrong fairly frequently, as Rossi and Morgan don’t hesitate to point out,” Aaron acknowledged lightly. Wendell wished for an x-ray machine back at the lab so he could see inside Aaron and settled for listening to Aaron’s breathing pick up. If he turned his palm up, he might feel Aaron’s pulse and make his very own lie detector. It would be a good time to ask if he’d missed Wendell, which was stupid because really, what did they know about each other, but Wendell had missed him.

Aaron still hadn’t pulled his hand away though he was trying, trying, to flatten out the curves of his mouth. Wendell remembered the feel of them against his. Maybe Aaron did too. He frowned. “But it isn’t hard to imagine that someone will get hurt.”

“Aaron not even you are that concerned for my feelings that you’d…” Wendell argued hotly, then stopped, then pulled in a long, long breath. “Holy shit,” he croaked, “you mean you.” 

He’d reach for the bottle of water to wet his throat but his fingers weren’t letting go of Aaron’s hand. He turned. Not quite sure he wanted to look in case he was wrong.

Aaron was watching him steadily and Wendell had figured out Aaron more than he’d thought because he recognized Aaron’s brand of silence now as Aaron’s way of answering questions he couldn’t answer without risking something. He trusted people to figure out on their own what he wasn’t saying. 

Fuck. Wendell wished he’d known that before. Not that he would have believed it. Aaron was fearless; he was a stone-faced FBI supervisory agent who stared down killers. That wasn’t even rumor. Wendell had seen him do it. 

He was also someone who had only ever loved one person aside from his son. And yeah, Aaron might just have meant that in every way Wendell could think of. 

It was a big investment even without Jack to consider. And he’d wanted to risk that on Wendell? Or _had_ wanted that, before. 

Wendell opened his mouth, then heard his cell phone go off in the pocket of his coveralls. He took his hand away to get it, not getting a word in with Dr. Brennan and not expecting to. He kept his eyes on Aaron, who gave that sheepish smile after a second and sighed and looked away. 

Wendell waited until Dr. Brennan had stopped making noises in his ear to guess when she was done speaking because he couldn’t hear a word right now and then ended the call.

He cleared his throat. 

“I have to get back.”

“Of course.” Aaron understood. It was annoying, how much he understood and how much he left Wendell to figure out. They weren’t done, not even a little bit, and Aaron was holding back by being reasonable. 

Wendell scowled at him though Aaron couldn’t see it. He had no idea what to do here or even what he wanted, aside from simply, _Aaron_ , but he knew that it was bullshit that Aaron was afraid of him. What was Wendell supposed to do? Prove to him that he was worth a shot? That was a lot to ask for something that Aaron doubted would turn out well. 

The thing was, even feeling like shit for a while, for a long time, for forever, was better than not feeling anything. It had to be. 

“I have to go,” he said again. He couldn’t think about this here. Aaron understood that too. He nodded and rose to his feet. When he pulled out his sunglasses Wendell stopped him, putting a hand on his arm that Aaron didn’t shake off. “You _will_ catch this guy, right? Because you have to catch this guy.” Putting aside everything else, at the moment that was what he wanted most in the world. 

“I will,” Aaron spoke seriously, though he had to be crazy because he made it sound like Wendell could extract an impossible promise from him just that easily, but he said it like he meant it when he knew for a fact nothing was guaranteed, and Wendell caught a glimpse of something sad in his expression before Aaron slipped his sunglasses back on.

He turned to face the others coming across the field toward them, a group of techs and also Rossi and Booth, and Booth looked between the two of them with one short, fierce look that he would deny later if anyone asked. That look didn’t fade one bit at Wendell’s careful head shake, but Wendell didn’t say anything as that group met up. Aaron could handle it and Dr. Brennan was calling him again. 

Wendell turned back toward the tents filled with lives cut short and felt the heat of the sun and Aaron’s stare at his back as he started moving.


End file.
